UDS – Day 5

Last day *sob* the week has flown, it’s not even funny, day one I knew nobody, and in less than a week I’ve made some great friends and it was fantastic.

Final sessions for the Community track:

Friday Roundtable

Revamping The Free Culture Showcase

Translations Roundtable

Women In Ubuntu

Membership Boards Review

Technical Board Review

Feedback Session

So firstly for those not familiar with the Free Culture showcase, lets explain it a little.

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to show off high quality free culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing free software and free culture, and with each development cycle we open the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, this is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere.

So the discussion was about how to make it more open to more people how to advertise it better to include as many people as possible, how to better upload and perhaps the use of Ubuntu One to upload the submissions. The use of facebook, twitter, digg, identi.ca to promote the event, these avenues can always be used for LoCo team events also. I personally try and let local colleges know about my events as student might be interested in coming along or participating in them.

The Ubuntu Women discussion happened as I’d mentioned to Maco about the possibility of a meet up at the begining of the week, and the good thing about UDS is that you can at times if space is available add a new session which we did.

We covered topics on how best to encourage women to come into the channel, use the mailing list basically point out that these resources are availabe and are a way of intereacting with folks. It was a packed session with many guys participating which is great as they had some questions on how to attract more females into their groups and participate in events.

Also there seems to be some perception that one needs to be a developer not only to be involved in -women but also within the community. You don’t have to be the are many other areas you can participate in the project.

I’m not a developer but I like to organise things, put people in contact with others. Translations and bug triaging always need to be done and anyone can help out and do these things. Hopefully this month the Ireland LoCo will run a Jam session that will help with these two aspects.

Finally the feedback session, the final wrap up. It was a great week with ideas floating all around the place and projects to work on. I can only imagine how long some of the leaders action list of items to do are.

Thanks to the folks at Canonical who made this week possible. Thanks to the community who were not only welcoming but also made particpating fun. See you soon!